The bag feels light, almost weightless as I bustle through the station en route to missing my train. I'll miss my train because I can no longer control the whirlwind, because the tiger I'm riding cannot change its stripes. Missing this train took a minute of ill-preparedness which took a day of muddled thinking which has taken weeks of bi-directional candle-burning. And I won't miss this train because, for now, the tiger loves me and wants me to be happy. It carries me to the ticket barrier and we bound through. It smiles its Cheshire Cat smile at the staff who whisk me past the queue. It settles me in my seat with such silken grace as to make all this seem so easy, so inevitable that a greater romantic than I (and that is no mean feat) would cry 'destiny!' But the tiger just smiles. And if I've manifested away the rough edges of my chosen course and sworn there are no rocks below the lovely smoothness of this water then I have also pressed my wet finger to th
Day 93 - Dong Hoi Is hair of the dog a universal concept? (certain stricter Muslim countries aside). If so there may be something in it. Nevertheless I declined the café owner's kind offer of a beer and a toke on his enormous pipe (arf) and settled for a black coffee instead. A coffee served neither hot nor cold and the fact that the right word for this temperature escapes me shows the effects of my escapades over the past two nights. It was but a bitter drop in the black ocean of my fatigue. Anticipating an even worse day than yesterday I wearily swung my leg over the bike. After a few kilometres of riding that felt like nails on a chalkboard, if my brain was the chalkboard and the nails were nails, I pulled over to the side of the road. There was only one thing for it, I needed the help of a patron saint. Now you'd think that Saint Christopher would be the obvious choice, his specialism being travellers and all. But I felt a bit hypocritical calling on the help of a holy man